No plans to sue Linux companies, says SCO

The SCO Group said today it had never planned to sue any Linux companies, had no concrete plans to sue anyone and also no current plans to take a commercial Linux customer to court.

The company was responding to questions routed through its PR people in Sydney.

As the Canopy Group, which has a stake in SCO, also has interests in several other Linux companies, SCO was asked whether it planned to sue all these companies. The answer was "No. SCO has never planned to sue Linux companies."

In June, SCO senior vice-president Chris Sontag was quoted as saying the company would either will file a new suit or amend its lawsuit against IBM to target other companies which SCO alleges are illegally appropriating its Unix source code.

Today SCO also said it had no current plans to take a commercial Linux customer to court.

Earlier this year the company issued a letter to commercial Linux users threatening them with legal action.

Among the companies in which Canopy is involved is Linux Networx, which has supplied a supercomputer to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; asked whether SCO would sue the laboratory, the company spokesperson said: "No. SCO has never made concrete plans to sue anyone."

In a statement made on August 20, SCO chief executive officer Darl McBride said the company was identifying Linux users for possible litigation.

In March, SCO filed a billion-dollar lawsuit against IBM, for "misappropriation of trade secrets, tortious interference, unfair competition and breach of contract."

SCO also claimed that Linux was an unauthorised derivative of Unix and warned commercial Linux users that they could be legally liable for violation of intellectual copyright. SCO later expanded its claims against IBM to US$3 billion in June when it said it was withdrawing IBM's licence for its own Unix, AIX.